Iron Village News

First of all, thanks so much everyone for playing Iron Village! It's been great to see how well received the game has been, and I'm looking forward to building onto it some more!

Some stats if you're curious:

• Over 500 sales
  
• Over 3600 outstanding wishlists (I see you all waiting for the summer sale 😂)
  
• 391 unique users
  
• Median time played of 53 minutes
  
• 17 reviews, 88% positive
  

It looks like we haven't had any critical errors (although you may have noticed the release version was 1.0.01, not .00 🙃), so this release is more full of minor goodies and tweaks rather than major fixes. Here's what's coming out:

• In 1.0.00, there was an issue with loading saves with Royal Palace construction sites. Basically, it was expecting a progress bar to be present, but there wasn't one, so the game wouldn't finish loading. Both parts of that have been fixed now: the progress bar is there, and loading games won't freak out over a missing progress bar.
  
• The next bit was an upgrade to Godot 4.4, the main feature of which was typed dictionaries! This is a technical detail, but basically pre-4.4 the lists of resources for building costs were actually two separate lists: one with resource types (an enum), and one with resource counts. I've finally been able to refactor that into one list with both, and in the process I found a couple of typos in costs, so that should all be fixed.
  
• Fixed an issue in the late game where placing buildings, roads, and demolitions would cause a noticeable lag. This was because the game recalculates the navigation mesh whenever a new building changes how villagers move around, and the way I was calling it would force the game to wait for those calculations to finish. That doesn't happen anymore, so the game can continue running smoothly.
  

• Invented the modern technology of doors. Villagers will now open and shut doors when entering/leaving buildings, complete with sound.
  
• Fixed an issue where the incorrect minimum approval rating would show - basically, the game was showing the minimum approval for the level you're on, rather than the next level.
  
• Slightly decreased electrical demand of trains. Electricity can be difficult to produce quickly enough for the new locomotives, so hopefully this helps ease perpetual shortages.
  
• Made double-wide roads render better. Technically, making roads two tiles wide doesn't really widen them, they still act as two parallel roads, but I've rewritten the road tiling logic in a way that at least makes it look like one big road, rather than some sort of net.
  

Anyway, I've got things sketched out for the first big update, 1.1. Unless this update breaks something horribly, then 1.1 will be the next update. However, I have plenty of things I want to talk about in dev diaries later, so stay tuned!

There’s still 1 day until Iron Village is out, but the 1.0 version of the demo is available now! Here is the list of changes since 0.8.04 came out:

• Fixed an issue with the Log Cabin not having correct upgrades.
  
• Lowered population caps to 20, 40, 60, 80, and 120.
  
• A bunch of things for level 5. (No Spoilers!)
  

• Added an autosale feature, unlocked at level 3. This allows you to automatically sell resources, leaving a specified minimum stock if you choose.
  
• Added logic to handle game controllers becoming disconnected, pausing the game and displaying a popup.
  
• Pause the game when the Steam Overlay is up.
  
• Adjusted coal tenders to show as full with 4 coal. (Was previously 8, but trains never needed this much coal.)
  
• Enable demolition to be cancelled.
  

• Added a Logistics Office, built in level 3, which allows for autosale (described above) and job prioritization (described below).
  
• Finally fixed an issue that sometimes prevented quarries from being demolished.
  
• Added additional tutorials for features in levels 3-5.
  
• Adjusted the starting camera position, and now persist the camera position in save files.
  
• Building buttons widen themselves if the title or description is too long. (Surprisingly, Spanish was the biggest offender, not German.)
  

• Updated the farm fields in the main menu to be 2×1, the same as in game.
  
• Added villagers to the main menu.
  
• Fixed CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) font to use another pixel font as backup, removing instances of mismatched “ransom note” font appearance in certain words.
  
• Adjusted window header size for CJK fonts.
  
• Included the actual approval rating in the next level requirements.
  
• Added an option in the settings to play zoomed out – note that this is not a game feature (yet) per se, but an option to make things look better on large screens. It also will not allow a pixel ratio under 2, so it will not zoom out at the game’s default resolution.
  
• Added flower bushes to the windmill.
  
• Added a bit of dirt around the well.
  
• Steam Achievements!
  
• Added a “Miscellaneous” category of buildings.
  

• Added player-customizable job priorities: rather than rely on their algorithms, you can make certain resources “+1” or “-1” priority, which makes them consider resources producing those types earlier or later in their job hunt.
  
• Added building thumbnails to the Info Box, so when you select a building it shows a little icon of it.
  
• Added a little status icon for buildings with missing storage.
  
• Fixed an issue with customizing the railway logo mid-game (i.e. it didn’t work).
  
• Added a progress bar to construction projects to get a glance of their progress outside of the info box.
  
• Educated villagers on the need to look both ways before crossing the tracks.
  
• Added a button in the custom railway logo window to clear all of the pixels.
  
• Edited the credits to better handle “日本語, 中国人, 中國人”
  
• Added Bea McCullagh as QA
  
• Fixed some issues with controllers and the UI.
  
• Fixed an issue where demolishing a storage building would reduce the remaining storage by double. (This would be fixed on reloading the game.)
  
• Animals now spawn at different points in their animation, so they’re not all mirroring each other.
  
• Adjusted the focus texture to be (barely) noticeable on selected buttons.
  
• Fixed the sounds to actually play based on position, shrunk the audible radii, and made the loudest sounds quieter. (The sounds were doing this theoretically, but all from the top left corner of the map, audible within 2000 in-game pixels. This is just about everywhere.)
  
• Fixed an issue with animal z layering, a.k.a. why are there cows on the roof?
  
• Added more grass, so that users with comically large screens are less likely to see the endless grey void.
  
• More game balance changes, I’m sure things will need additional balance.
  

(As of March 20th, 2025 there are 4 days to go until Iron Village releases!)

Iron Village releases on Steam in 3 days – March 24th at 9:00 EDT (GMT-4)! I’ll have some release notes for the final build later, but for now I wanted to take an opportunity to talk about what’s going on now. I want to capture a snapshot before the actual release, and take a bit of a look back at how things got here. It’ll be interesting to compare to how everything goes after the release, and how that potentially changes my views of things, but this will more accurately capture my thoughts before further hindsight comes in to mess things up.

To start, why have March 24th as a release date? Well, back in September I signed up for Steam’s City Builder & Colony Sim Fest – basically a special sale page on Steam that shows games that fit the genre, including demos. The festival starts on… March 24th. Given that games on sale get the most prominent position on the page, the best way to take advantage of the opportunity would (IMO) be to launch with a release sale: a built-in Steam feature that allows you to set a sale of 10 or 15% off for 7 to 14 days upon initial release.

Setting a hard deadline is fairly scary, but also it was far enough away that I figured it wouldn’t be an issue at all – but of course, I originally thought this was only going to take a couple of months. So eventually, the desire to make things as well as I could meant that I only actually finished the end game content a couple of weeks ago. This is very much not ideal, since it interferes with the time needed to thoroughly test and balance the game, as well as getting a complete product to YouTubers and Twitch streamers. The net result is that while I think Iron Village is still a good (and most importantly, fun) game, the balance may be a little off, and marketing efforts definitely suffered. The hard deadline also meant annoying the translators a little – instead of being able to request translations in bulk, I ended up making some last minute requests along the lines of “these are the last two strings, I swear”, only to be wrong a couple days later.


(A screenshot of my current town, showing some of the late game content that only squeezed in last minute.)

There is a little bit of polish (for instance, villager working animations) that is not getting done due to the hard time limit, and some last minute changes aren’t getting tutorial text on launch due to the need to get them translated. I’m listing all these negative aspects of setting a hard date, so what are the positives? Well, part of the hard deadline is a motivational factor to actually get this game finished. I don’t really get the option of indefinitely postponing the release, since I would lose out on the visibility the festival offers. While I can’t tell the future, I can make some rough guesses based on Next Fest last month. Getting that spotlight in the Steam store was enough to take Iron Village from 1025 active* wishlists on February 23rd to 1897 on March 3rd. (As of March 20th, we’re at 2309 active wishlists.)

*As in, wishlists that haven’t since been deleted or converted into sales. For transparency, there have been 205 wishlist removals as of March 20th, and 1 conversion: Thiago Mania, who has been translating Iron Village into Brazilian Portuguese. ↩︎
Will the visibility of the City Builder festival be worth all of those negatives? I think so, but only time will tell. I can say that I’m not planning on doing that again, the stress of having a side project with a hard deadline and a full time job, plus actually making time for my family, is too much to do all over again. If I can turn game development into a full time job, then sure, there might be a situation when setting such a deadline so far out makes sense. But otherwise, this is a one time thing.

To wrap up this dev diary, I’ll talk a bit about what I’m planning on doing post-launch. Some of this definitely depends on how the launch actually goes: if reviews turn out to be quite negative, or there’s lots of issues that I’ve managed to miss, then it’s all subject to change. However, the rough plan of releases is as follows:

• Initial Bugfixes. Depending on how many of those are needed, and how urgent they may be, this could be anything from a same day/next day emergency patch to an update a week or two later with quality-of-life tweaks.
  
• Android Release. In order to focus on the Steam launch, I pushed the Android release out to an ETA of April. Most of the work there comes down to two things: UI improvements (it’s a small touch screen, so while everything works, it can be better.) and Google Play Games integration (mainly for the achievements).
  
• The First Big Update (1.1). I’ll talk more about this later, but the plan is to get:
  
• a. Some more quality-of-life changes that didn’t end up in the first patch(es).
  
• b. Improvements that require translated text, such as improved tutorials.
  
• c. New Buildings: A few more variations of existing buildings, as well as a couple of projects that have been conceptualized but did not end up in the main release.
  
• d. A “Soft Ending”: Right now, there is no well defined end to the game – you build everything, get a decently efficient economy running, and then just run out of things to do. It would be nice to tie things into the backstory and add some sort of final project/event, even though you will still be able to play beyond this ending.
  
• Two themed updates (1.2 and 1.3). I have some ideas for larger thematic updates, kind of like free DLC.
  
• I’m not planning on working on Iron Village forever (I’ve got too many other game ideas bouncing around in my head for that), but I figure there’s still plenty of room for it to grow.
  

If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’ve already added Iron Village to your wishlist – but if not, go ahead and do it so you can be reminded to buy it when it releases. Alternatively, you can just set an alarm for 9 in the morning EDT (13:00 UTC) on March 24th, but then I don’t get to see the wishlist line go up on the Steam charts 😥.

Big milestone here – Iron Village has been updated just in time for Steam Next Fest! The biggest changes in this version are five (5) new languages: French, German, Japanese, and Chinese in both Simplified & Traditional forms.



(Hopefully you don’t need Potato Storage translated, because I totally forgot to put that string in the translation table. Oops.)

I didn’t post Diary #39 – 0.7.39 Release Notes to all of the usual platforms, so some changes since the last release notes will be there, but otherwise here’s what’s changed/been fixed:

• Fixed more issues with certain sounds not being affected by the volume slider.
  
• Finished electrification (level 4+)
  
• Implemented the ability to cancel demolition/tree chopping. (Currently disabled due to lack of translated strings, will be enabled in the next version.)
  
• Buildings can now be upgraded from within the info panel.
  
• Added support for French, German, Japanese, and Chinese (Simplified & Traditional).
  
• Fixed an issue on Steam Deck where controller hints would flicker while pressing and dragging out a road.
  
• Made the on screen keyboard automatically come up when the text box is selected in the Steam Cloud save window.
  

Bon voyage !

So the huge downside to setting a release date is now I have to hurry up and finish the rest of the game content. Normally I would’ve waited longer, but with the Steam City Builder Fest coming up at the end of March, the dice have already been cast.

Thankfully, level 4 is actually pretty close to being done (apart from kitchens and electrification), and level 5 is definitely underway. Will the game be released somewhat unfinished? It depends on what you mean – there’ll definitely be room for balancing, but the core of the game has been pretty well refined by now. This at least means I won’t chicken out. 😊

So, what even is in the end game? I’m not going to post too much in the way of spoilers, but I’ll give a bit of a preview: Level 4 is the Heavy Industrial Permit, and Level 5 is City Status.





The Heavy Industrial Permit unlocks all of the other industries that weren’t already unlocked. The most prominent one is the steel industry: build iron ore mines to dig up shiny rocks, forge steel from iron ore and coal in the Steel Foundry, and then use that steel to build valuable tools.

This permit also includes a tailor to turn wool into clothes, and your very own Chippy! Now you can finally produce the advanced Belgian technology of french fries!

There’s one other feature that I’ll tease here – the Artificer’s Guild has some plans to improve the propulsion of the trains, but they’ll need a decent haul of resources to implement them.





The ultimate symbol of your town’s accomplishment is City Status, bestowed by the monarch themselves. By this point you will have already unlocked all of the normal buildings, but there are a few landmark buildings and projects you can build. For instance, there’s two locations on the edge of the map that allow the construction of a deep mine. The cost is steep, but the reward is faster extraction of minerals, and some newer rare materials as well!

Most of this you’re just going to have to discover for yourself though 🙂

Anyway, that’s the summary of the late game – I’m also dropping 0.7.39 shortly (if I haven’t done so already) to get things tidied up for Next Fest at the end of the month! Release notes to follow soon.